Always in my Heart

The grief that comes with loosing your baby can cloud much of the remaining good in life. Consider ways to find solace as you work toward accepting the death and moving forward.

- Akanksha Pandey

One of the most exciting periods in a person’s life is when they become a parent, with high hopes and expectations for how life will be as you raise your children. The loss of a child, regardless of age, is a traumatic and painful experience.

While grief is unpleasant at any time, studies continue to show that the greatest stress, and often the most long-lasting, is experienced by parents who lose a child. Individuals and families possess a wide range of traits and capacities enabling them to cope with interpersonal loss and emerge changed but not broken.

Adults with complicated grieving, experience mourning combined with symptoms of separation anguish, and trauma. For at least six months, a person experiences extreme levels of ‘separation distress’ symptoms (intrusive thoughts, yearning, and excessive loneliness), as well as extreme levels of ‘traumatic distress’ symptoms (excessive irritability, bitterness, or anger, shattered worldview, etc.), resulting in significant functional impairment and emotional dysregulation. Perinatal loss occurs in about 1.2% of pregnancies that last longer than 20 weeks and up to one-month post-delivery. While 15–20% of all recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage, there may be an equivalent number of subclinical early pregnancy losses that are referred to as “late periods”.